Economic Rational Decision Making, Game theory, Life satisfaction and Links

Post date: Apr 22, 2017 5:08:41 PM

I were in a meeting and now I've got a reason to make sure, I'm making a good rational decisions. That's why I decided to re-listened the talks Thinking Like an Economist. Loved it, pure logic of making money and evaluating deals. Well said, it's all just common sense. Let's see if there's anything new, which wouldn't be obvious with that common sense and logic. Many things sound like stereotypes, because well, those are absolutely true. You can't even argue against those. Spent a weekend reminding my self about basics.

Talks of course had several very good real life examples.

Principles:

People respond to incentives

There is no such thing as a free lunch

No thing is just one thing - There are always (at least) two sides to every interaction

Law of unanticipated influences

Law of unintended consequences

No one is in control

Core concepts:

Rationality

Marginal analysis

Optimization

Efficiency

Some related links, which I also visited and read as addition to listening the lessons / lectures / course + exams.

After finishing all that, I'm actually I'm quite happy. These talks contained words and concepts in English, I wasn't fully familiar with. But after all the concepts and models were all very familiar. It's just common sense, like I stated earlier. Considering options and making rational decisions aka sane choices. This is also demonstrate diminishing returns on learning more about economic thinking. If I take a two day course on topic, and won't learn anything new, it's all time & money wasted. Some of these areas are just pure math and logic, but some are ahem bit more complex. Once again, everything is a trade-off.

I also considered to read reading the Finnish books:

Lamantaittaja

Välähdyksiä pimeässä ja pimeitä välähdyksiä

Väärää talouspolitiikkaa

Mahdoton menestys

Kaikki oikein

Erinlainen ote omaan talouteen

Raha ja Onni

Only funny thing is that when I asked a few friends whom clearly would benefit from thinking like an economist concepts, they all refused to be interested about these concepts. I guess that's what makes the difference.

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